I really like your line that "Some technologies are both very impressive *and* not useful."

I had fun with this, and love the clear and conceptual answer given. I took a bit more of a symbolic approach...

Followup, it is not actually doubling each time. The first time I was able to stretch the clip from 5 seconds to 8.35 seconds. If this ratio continues how many times?

Lovely question!

I have (maybe still kinda do, I dunno) felt the same! I wonder if this is a function of the calculators we had at the time. I wonder if this idea is maybe less common among kids today who have calculators that default to fractional answers.

I use www.graphfree.com/grapher.html

It's my go to end of class filler. One version I tried a while ago was the second lowest number game. Where your goal is to have the second lowest non cancelled number. It ends up creating a bit of a paradox in that no one should write 1, but if no one would write 1, no one should write 2 and ...

One that takes a bit of prep is margin of error trivia, find 10 hard trivia questions with numeric answers. Students then answer the questions with a range of values they feel is a 90% confidence interval to contain the answer. So it is a question of how well you know what you know.

One students were playing today, wavelength. A student chooses a rating from 1 to 10 in their head. Other kids give them categories like "cars" and the student gives an example of a car at their rating. Then after a few categories students try and guess the rating.

For whole class, the greatest game, all students get blank paper write a phrase, then pass the paper, next person draws a picture of the phrase, that person folds over the original prase so only the picture is visible and passes it, next writes what the picture is and this continues for a few rounds

For pairs, undercut, students count down and hold out 1 to 5 fingers, they score the points they hold out UNLESS one of the numbers is one less than the other, in that case the person with the lower number scores the sum of the points and the other player gets nothing. Need to win by 11 pts.

For 15 min or so with full class lowest number game, students write whole numbers on scraps of paper with the goal of writing the lowest number no one else has wrote, so one is the lowest possible number but if two people write 1 it is eliminated.

Games, either as a class or in small groups.

Shouldn't it be a very hard problem and only those who answer correctly are restricted?

Like when you forget to feed your parrot?

Music for airports gets decent play in my classes (though mostly the background music is Cage's 4'33")

On Thursday (today/ they did research and used an online calculator to find how much lye they need to add to the fats to make soap, which ties in nicely with the ratio idea from Wednesday. Then did the carbide cannon to really drill the idea of ratios (and have a bang).

Tomorrow we make soap.

On Tuesday we did Iodine Clock on how concentration affects reaction rate and what ions are.

On Wednesday we did an antacid titration, which really gets the idea of the ratio of reactants.